Peacock’s Dr. Death breathes new life into a shocking true-crime podcast
The adaptation does no harm, and actually elevates the source material
TV Reviews Dr. Death
Peacock’s Dr. Death is the latest of a surprisingly rare breed: a scripted TV series adapted from a popular true-crime podcast. Between the lurid subject matter, meticulous reportage, and preexisting narrative structures, the genre pleads to be transformed into prestige-adjacent eight-episode runs. But to be fair, doing so is risky business. A tin-eared performance or miscalculated tone is all it takes to evoke the most mercenary of Lifetime’s ripped-from-the-headlines factory farm. Riskier still, if a work of narrative non-fiction is impressive enough to warrant an adaptation, it may not gain anything from the effort.
Such was the case with Dirty John, USA’s scripted spin on the Wondery podcast about a mild-mannered interior design mogul and her hasty, horrific relationship with a malignant romance scammer. Dirty John was, at its very best, a competent and respectful staging of a story that had become its best self long before Connie Britton and Eric Bana stepped into the lead roles. That history is what makes Dr. Death, the second scripted series born of a Wondery podcast, a pleasant surprise wrapped in a decidedly unpleasant story. In fact, this adaptation manages to improve on its source material, perhaps because the story of Dr. Christopher Duntsch is so monstrous, it must be seen to be believed.
Joshua Jackson stars as Duntsch, a Dallas-based neurosurgeon who would end up serving a life sentence connected to a roughly three-year surgical rampage during which he maimed or killed dozens of people. In case after disastrous case, patients put their faith in Duntsch, hoping a minimally-invasive spinal procedure will rid them of herniated discs and pinched lumbar nerves. After going under his knife, the vast majority of them wake up to debilitating pain, gouged organs, or total paralysis. That’s if they’re fortunate enough to wake up at all.
Despite the mangled bodies left in his wake, Duntsch packs his schedule with surgeries, flitting to a new hospital each time his operating privileges are quietly revoked at another. The only thing more terrifying than Duntsch’s ruinous persistence is how easily he escapes scrutiny in a professional culture that emphasizes hospital politics and offers boundless deference to split-second judgment calls.
That latitude evaporates when Robert Henderson (Alec Baldwin), a fellow neurosurgeon, is called in to repair one of Duntsch’s procedures and finds evidence of work so shoddy, he initially concludes Duntsch is an unlearned imposter. The truth is far thornier than that once Henderson starts investigating Duntsch’s provenance with help from Randall Kirby (Christian Slater), a vascular surgeon with the misfortune of witnessing Duntsch’s overconfident butchery. Henderson and Kirby are only armed with righteous indignation, but they’re the only ones willing to risk their careers to end Duntsch’s.
If that description sounds more like a show about renegade detectives rather than medical specialists, that’s because showrunner Patrick Macmanus foregrounds Henderson and Kirby’s odd-couple dynamic in the early episodes. Henderson is a humble institutionalist, eager to stop Duntsch but always aware of the feathers he might ruffle in doing so. That leaves Kirby to play the bad cop, delivering his expert opinions in vulgar plainspeak and advocating for the most ostentatious course of action. As much fun as it is watching Baldwin and Slater play off each other, the show is at its most redundant when it feels like a procedural called Dallas Malpractice: Criminal Intent.
Dr. Death comes alive as Duntsch moves from the periphery. Naturally, the show’s success relies heavily on Jackson, whose eternal boyishness has never been wielded to greater effect. Jackson turns in a deft and nuanced performance in a role that spans two decades and requires him to play the show’s protagonist and antagonist simultaneously. The show flashes back to Duntsch’s days as a college football walk-on whose dreams of Heisman glory are dashed by an apparent inability to tell right from left. (This shortcoming persists into Duntsch’s surgical career with predictably gruesome results.)
Duntsch’s character is initially confusing in the pilot, which, like the rest of the series, pogos around the chronology at a merciless pace. It begins as Duntsch is well into his inauspicious surgical career, barking orders at nurses and bristling at any criticism of the improvised technique wrecking his patients’ bodies. Why would such a wide berth be granted to someone so supercilious and reckless? As the fractured narrative connects more of its pieces, Jackson gets to flash more of Duntsch’s superficial charm, his deep insecurities, and his all-consuming desire to impress his withholding parents.
But in spite of its observant lens and Jackson’s able performance, Dr. Death comes just shy of a truly cutting character study. The primary flaw in the series is the same one that plagues the podcast: Duntsch only gets more opaque the more he’s illuminated. It remains unclear which of Duntsch’s maladjustments most contributed to his bad medicine. Could he have avoided his deadly outcomes had he gotten his raging drug addiction under control? Did his actions constitute actual malice, or is his a case of Dunning-Kruger effect taken to an especially macabre conclusion?
Those questions still linger years after the conclusion of Duntsch’s case, which is why Dr. Death is at its most vital when it enters the courtroom phase. The responsibility of teasing out Duntsch’s actual motives falls to Michelle Shughart (AnnaSophia Robb), a young and plucky prosecutor intent on punishing him, despite the rarity of criminally charging physicians for on-the-job tragedies. The most Shughart can do is establish that, to the permanently injured patients, the distinction between evil and incompetence is technical at best.
The real job of convicting Duntsch falls to the all-female directorial team (Maggie Kiley, Jennifer Morrison, and So Yong Kim) and their skillful staging of each botched procedure. There’s unbearable suspense to the surgery sequences, even as the audience can predict the outcomes, and it’s impossible not to wince as Duntsch digs and yanks at his patients’ most sensitive anatomy. Most of the horror is implied through meticulous sound design and reaction shots from the traumatized bystanders. Even with relatively little actual viscera, the tragedy of Duntsch’s rampage stands among the year’s most visceral TV experiences.
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Henderson, Kirby and Duntsch: The first ever surgery/law firm! They’ll fuck you up and then sue themselves and get you the money YOU deserve!
The name Dewey, Maimem and Howe was already taken.
Hilariously appropriate that Alec Baldwin is in this — the whole time I was listening to the Dr. Death podcast (which is excellent, btw), I kept picturing Baldwin’s asshole surgeon character in Malice as Duntsch.
I AM GOD!I have the podcast and thought I’d watch the first episode of this and then listen to it.
I kept thinking about that watching this show! He can no longer play the hot young egomaniac with a God complex, he has to be the wise elder trying to take the young hotshot down.
I feel like if I tried to get a job at a deli they would check my references but apparently that’s not a thing when hiring doctors?
Medical culture makes it relatively hard for doctors to fail beyond a certain point. It reflects poorly on a residency or fellowship program if trainees don’t graduate and get jobs, and especially once you get to high intensity fields like neurosurgery there’s a culture of deference. So your references have a vested interest in saying nice things about you. One of the wild things about this story is just the Texas of it. The medical board dragged its feet on suspending his license because they couldn’t believe a (white) surgeon could be incompetent, and then the state did a full pivot and sentenced him to life in prison.
Hospitals all have a credentialing system that is designed to vet and verify that a doctor is credentialed and qualified to perform the role they are requesting. The sticky part comes usually from candidates that are either a) right out of training, or b) from other states or hospital systems. To start things off, nearly all of the candidates have medical licenses, and usually are either board certified or at least board eligible in their field (unless of course they lied, but that is easy to check). So with that in mind, let’s look at the problems with each case:a) With people right out of training, you pretty much rely on the fact that they passed the necessary tests, graduated from a credentialed school, and read their letters from their attendings in residency. The risks are 1) they may have passed the tests and done well in training under supervision, but just can’t function or make decisions alone when the attendings aren’t around, which is sometimes difficult to pick up on in today’s training environment, and 2) they may be substandard, but no one from their program is going to say that in a letter because it reflects poorly on the residency program as much as the candidate. Residencies don’t want a reputation of putting out a bad product, either.b) Similarly, people from other hospitals or other states will have the necessary certifications, board scores and peer reference letters, but often hospitals are gun-shy about flat out revoking privileges. The reason is that the hospital may open itself up to litigation from said doctor, who can claim that they are denying him/her the right to earn a living for which they are credentialed/trained. While these suits are rarely successful, when they are they can be quite expensive, and even if not litigated, still cost money. So some hospitals act as if the best solution from their standpoint is to make the doctor in question “someone else’s problem”, and do nothing to stand in the way (like by writing a bad reference letter) which would keep them from being hired elsewhere. Further, until recently, it can be hard for hospital credentialing systems even to GET the records of the surgeon’s past employment, even if the previous institution wants to be forthcoming. Add to that the fact that some vindictive hospital systems may bad-mouth a good surgeon just because they may be looking to practice at their competitor’s facility, and the matter gets even murkier.In summary, it’s a real problem that nearly everyone is trying to fix. That being said, there are some pretty big holes in the system, and often it takes the action of other dedicated medical professionals to make up for the defects in the system.
I heard a story this week on local news, hospital in Ohio did a kidney transplant on the wrong patient. Like a patient who wasn’t supposed to get a kidney transplant, or they gave the kidney to a patient who wasn’t supposed to get that particular kidney. I’m not sure.Luckily it’s compatible, but the original patient is now back on the waiting list.The Hospital’s statement was “we strive to provide the best care to our patients, but in this instance we fell short”. Ya think?
The show kept talking about how he came with “clean letters” and I was thinking about how at a lot of major law firms they don’t do “reference letters” so much as verify that someone was employed there and “to your knowledge” has no deficiencies to prevent them from working in the legal field. All protection from backlash and putting the onus on the new hirer, no recommendation, no actual information. I know nothing about medicine but was wondering if it was something similar to that.
Part of the reason was that he did graduate like top of his class and was very smart and did have solid bonifides, as a researcher. So when you looked at his resume and even if you double checked yes he did grad from this school and he did do a residency at X hospital. So no one expected him to lie about if he ever did surgeries.There are alot of other reasons why he fell through the cracks in addition but if you are told TheSillyman graduated top of his class at [Top Med school] and completed a neuroresidency at [top hospital] and both places confirm it you might leave it at that.
It just seems so weird and wrong that the first hospital he maimed people at would confirm he had worked there and leave it at that.
“Who? Oh yeah, old “Dr McMaimy”, worked here over the summer. Nice guy.”
For legal reasons, a lot of times former employers are limited to just that. Yes he worked here from this date to that date. Any negative comments could be used in a defamation lawsuit.
Even beyond the elaborate “professional courtesy/wall-of-silence” level of professions like medicine, there are enough hassles involved in giving negative references that I think they’re pretty rare outside of the most entry-level, deli-like, jobs. If somebody’s resume has them repeatedly changing jobs, you might be suspicious that they were encouraged to leave a lot, but if they can work the office politics effectively, they might not even leave that trail. And if they’re in a field where mobility is the rule, then you don’t even have that to go on.We hired a temp for a consulting project years ago, because his qualifications happened to coincide with a job we’d just taken on. He was bright and personable, but was absent from work a lot, and had a string of family tragedies to explain it — father got sick, and died… mother was despondent, and then killed herself… sister got sick…
When we got to look at some of his memos on the work he was supposedly doing, it was Seinfeld-”Penske File” level stuff. When we finally tried to follow up on some of his references (we’d retained him through an agency, so we foolishly thought they’d done the basic vetting), the responses were all along the lines of “Nice guy… shame about his family”. Digging deeper, with on-line resources, we found he’d had a whole separate string of jobs where he’d used his middle name first.
We joked that we had fired him just in time to save his sister.
“You’re firing me? The day after my … wait, who haven’t I used yet … third cousin died?”
I realise this is not the most legitimate source to quote from, but I’m thinking of the episode of ‘Mad Men’ where Joan’s fail-doctor of a husband moans, “Surgeons don’t say bad things about other surgeons” to explain why he isn’t progressing despite everyone seeming to praise him. I think there is a kind of gentlemen’s code thing where you don’t badmouth a colleague even if you think he’s sub-par. Obviously that should go out the window when it’s gone as far as patients being paralysed, but I can see his references only confirming his work history and staying discreetly quiet otherwise.
*laughs in Queensland Health*
Another layer to his history of maiming people was that he got ousted from the good hospitals first, then worked in increasingly poor hospitals with primarily black patients. So the people he maimed were largely poor POC, and the hospitals either felt unqualified to criticise him, or hesitant to lose the only surgeon who would work there.
Damnit now I have to subscribe to another streaming service. I have a herniated disc and listening to the podcast was horrifying on so many levels.
I hear ya. I have Amazon, Netflix, Apple, Peacock, HBO Max (thru my HBO subscription), Disney, and Paramount Plus. Which paid for itself by letting me watch A Quiet Place 2 for free, as my free month doesn’t end til Saturday. Why in God’s name I’m also paying for a Uverse subscription is a mystery to me. But my contract or whatever is up next month and I just may cancel it. I will say Peacock is worth the $5. It has tons of tv shows, movies, etc. And I believe it has a live stream. I’m pretty sure cable is going to be a thing of the past pretty soon. Who needs it?
Cable is going to be bundles of streaming services.
There’s a free tier of Peacock (that has ads), but not sure if it includes this show. I know shows like The Office aren’t available on the free tier.
This is on free Peacock
It is NOT free on Peacock, you have to either have Xfinity or Cox cables services, or pay $5 a month (with ads) to see it.Same thing with Rutherford Falls and Girls 5eva.
This was worth the $5.
There is suspension of disbelief and then there’s expecting an audience to root for Alec Baldwin over Joshua Jackson.
That could be the hook. “This guy was so heinous you’ll like him less than Alec Baldwin. Think about THAT!”
Interesting that the actor Jennifer Morrison (from House fame) directed an episode of this show.
That’s funny; she was Joshua Jackson’s love interest on Dawson’s Creek for a blip
That’s funny: “That’s funny; she was Joshua Jackson’s love” is seven words, and Andrew Jackson was our seventh president.
Alec Baldwin on a show on Peacock? Are we sure he’s not playing Jack Donaghy again?
No, he’s playing God in ‘God Cop’.
God Cop/Bod Cop?
They should do a 30 Rock Movie that is just one of Tracey Jordan’s movies. Produced by Liz and you can tell when they start running out of money.And the when they finally run out of money it transitions to the 30 Rock camera and music style while the characters trying to salvage the film and deal with the fact that Tracey refuses to get out of his car.
No, he’s lost weight and his hair is shorter, and the ego is in check. Hey, the dude has a wife and six kids (seven counting Ireland) and an ex wife to support, he’s the Joan Rivers of acting. “Take every job”.
Not only that, but one of the key patients was Chairman and CEO of GE and President of East Coast Television and Microwave Oven Programming, Kathy Geiss.
Jackson is great in this. Apparently Jamie Dornan was originally cast and had to drop out because of COVID, so the pandemic wasn’t all bad.
The pairing of Slater and Baldwin was not a team up I ever thought I wanted or needed. But now I’m totally down for Dallas Malpractice: Criminal Intent.
Yeah, they tossed that line out as if at least half the TV viewing public wouldn’t lap that right up.
Agree 100 %. I watched the first episode last night.It is really good. FYI, don’t eat while watching, as the surgery scenes are pretty graphic. Baldwin is good, his character at the outset is very even tempered, even tho he knows he’s chasing a sociopath. Joshua Jackson is terrifying.
I wasn’t planning on watching this but I’ve seen enough promotion for the show that I was curious and read the guy’s Wikipedia page. It’s actually horrifying what he got away with. The fact that other doctors were saying that no one with the slightest idea about human anatomy would have operated in this way should have been enough to get him removed long ago.
Yeah, I read that too. He reminds me of a guy in my med school class. He was one of those types who you could tell was going into medicine primarily so he could fund a certain lifestyle, which could be nicely summarized as involving cocaine, cars, casinos, and strippers. He wanted to go into neurosurgery or anesthesia ($$$$$, plus possible access to drugs, I assume). But unlike Duntsch, he presumably flamed out even earlier, since he was noticably absent from graduation.
After the last episode, there are statements indicating Texas has tried to clean up their medical error reporting processes. Baylor was sued, but all of a sudden the case was dropped I believe and they were fined $100,000, which as they say, is chicken feed to an institution like Baylor. What is terrifying is the first statement: (I’m paraphrasing)After cancer and heart disease, medical error is the third highest cause of death in the United States. Medical error. This cannot be 100% attributed to innocent mistakes, but to blatant disregard for a patient, improper training, etc.
Dug this quite a bit. Good, tight little show.
Really surprised at how good this show is. Just wanting to put it in enough comments that it’s on the free version of Peacock (which has been mentioned before but I want folks to be certain that it’s not another bait-and-switch that lulls you into thinking it’s free and then charges you on the 3rd episode.)
This was pretty good but the nonlinear storytelling was annoying and didn’t seem to add any extra dimension. That’s my only real complaint though, it’s still a good binge regardless.
I just finished this and thought it was really good. Unlike the reviewer, I found the opaqueness around how/why Duntsch did what he did to be a strength. His actions can’t be pinned down to just one explanation.I think the best thing about the series is that although it makes clear that Duntsch should be punished, he could have been stopped. The system in which he operated absolutely allowed him to continue. There is so much blame to go around.Just to echo some of the other posters. I very much enjoyed Baldwin and Slater and wish the show continued with them as amateur sleuths solving medical crimes. And the non-linear structure eventually just wound up making the incidents and victims less clear.